@article{ref1,
title="The Introduction of Crack Cocaine and the Rise in Urban Crime Rates",
journal="NBER working papers series",
year="1998",
author="Grogger, Jeff and Willis, Mike",
volume="1998",
number="online",
pages="w6353-w6353",
abstract="Despite widespread popular accounts linking crack cocaine to inner-city decay systematic research has analyzed the effect of the introduction of crack on urban crime.  We&quot; study this question using FBI crime rates for 27 metropolitan areas and two sources of&quot; information on the date at which crack first appeared in those cities.  Using methods designed to&quot; control for confounding time trends and unobserved differences among metropolitan areas find that the introduction of crack has substantial effects on violent crime but essentially no effect&quot; on property crime.  We explain these results by characterizing crack cocaine as a technological&quot; innovation in the market for cocaine intoxication and by positing that different types of crimes&quot; play different roles in the market for illegal drugs.  In a market with incomplete property rights&quot; and inelastic demand, a technological innovation increases violence on the part of distributors but&quot; decreases property crime on the part of consumers.  We also find evidence that the increase in&quot; urban crime during the 1980's occurred in two distinct phases: an early phase largely attributable&quot; to the spread of crack and a later phase largely unrelated to it.<p />",
language="",
issn="0898-2937",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}